A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs - Episode 63: “Susie Q” by Dale Hawkins

Episode Date: December 30, 2019

Episode sixty-three of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “Susie Q” by Dale Hawkins, and at the difference between rockabilly and electric blues. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Shake a Hand” by Faye Adams. (more…)

A History of Rock Music in 500 songs By Andrew Hock Episode 63 Susie Q by Dale Hawkins We're pretty much at the end of the true rockabilly era already All the major figures to come out of Sun Studios have done so

And while 1957 saw several country-influenced white rock and rollers show up like Buddy Holly and the Everly Brothers, and those singers will often get referred to as rockabilly. They don't tend to get counted by aficionados of the sub-genre, who think they don't sound enough like the music from Sun to count. But there are still a few exceptions. And one of those is Dale Hawkins, the man whose recordings were to spark a whole new sub-genre,

the style of music that would later become known as Swamp Rock. Dale Hawkins never liked being called a rockabilly, though that's the description that most people now use of him. We'll look later in the episode at how accurate that description actually is, but for the moment the important thing is that he thought of himself as a blues man. When he was living in Shreveport, Louisiana, he lived in a shack in the black part of town, and inside the shack there was only a folding camp bed,

a record player, and thousands of 78 RPM blues records. Nothing else at all. It's not that he didn't like country music, of course. As a kid, he and his brother hitchhiked to a nearby town to go to a flat and Scrooks gig, and he also loved Hank Williams and Jimmy Rogers. But it was the blues that called to him more, and so he never thought of himself as having the country element

that would normally be necessary for someone to call themselves a rockabilly. While he didn't have much direct country influence, he did come from a country music family. His father, Delmar Hawkins Sr., was a country musician who was, according to some sources, one of the original members of the Sons of the Pioneers, the group that launched the career of Roy Rogers. While Hawkins Senior's name isn't in any of the official lists of group members, he might well have performed with them at some point in the early years of the group.

And whether he did or didn't, he was definitely a bass player in many other hillbilly bands. However, it's unlikely that Delmore Hawkins Sr. had much influence on his son, as he left the family when Delmore Jr. was three. and didn't reconnect until after Susie Q became a hit. Del Mar Sr. wasn't the only family member to be a musician either. Dale's younger brother Jerry was a rockabilly who made a few singles in the 50s. Another family member, Ronnie Hawkins, would later have his own musical career, which would intersect with several of the artists

were going to be looking at later in this series. Del Hawkins, as he was originally called, did a variety of jobs, including a short stint as a sailor after dropping out of school. But he soon got the idea of becoming a musician and started performing with Sonny Jones, a local guitarist whose sister was Hank Williams' widow. Jones had a lot of contacts in the local music.

music industry and helped Hawkins pull together the first line-up of his band when he was 19. While Hawkins thought of himself as a blues musician, for a white singer in Shreveport, there was only one option open if he wanted to be a star, and that was performing on the Louisiana hayride, the country show where Elvis, among many others, had made his name, and Jones had many contacts on the show and performed on it himself. But Hawkins's first job at the Louisiana hayride wasn't as a performer, but working in the car park. He and his brother would go up to drivers heading into the car park for the show and charge them 50 cents to park their cars for them. When the car park filled up, they'd just park the cars on the street outside. What they didn't tell the drivers was that

the car park was actually free to the public. At the same time he was starting out as a musician, Dell was working in a record shop, Stan's record shop, run by a man named Stan Lewis. Hawkins had been a regular customer for several years before working up the courage to ask for a job there, and by the time he got the job, he was familiar with almost every blues or R&B record that was available at the time. Customers would come into the shop, sing a snatch of a song they'd heard, and young Dell would be able to tell them

the title and the artist. It was through doing this job that Hawkins became friendly with customers like B.B. King, who would remain a lifelong friend. It was also while working at Stan's record shop, that Hawkins became better acquainted with its owner. Stan Lewis was, among other things, things, both a talent scout for chess records and one of the biggest customers of the label.

If he got behind a record, chess knew it would sell, at least in Louisiana, and so they would listen to him. Indeed, Lewis was one of the biggest record distributors, as well as a record shop owner, and he distributed records all across the region to many other stores. Lewis also worked as a record producer. The first record he ever produced was one of the biggest blues hits of all time, Lowell Fulson's Reconsider Baby, which was released on the chess subsidiary Checker.

Lewis took an interest in his own way that I will miss you. his young employee's music career, and introduced Hawkins to his cousin, DJ Fontana, another musician who played on the Louisiana Hayride. Fontana played with Hawkins for a while, before taking on a better paid job with Elvis Presley. At Lewis's instigation, Hawkins went into the studio in 1956, with Engineer Merle Kilgore, who would later become famous in his own right as a country songwriter, co-writing songs like Ring of Fire, his new guitarist James Burton, and several other musicians, to record a demo of what would become Hawkins' most famous song, Susie Q.

Listening to that, it's clear that they already had all the elements of the finished record nearly in place. The main difference between that and the finished version that they cut later is that the demo has a saxophone. solo, and that James Burton hasn't fully worked out his guitar part, although it's close to the final version. At the time he cut that track, Hawkins intended it as a potential first single, but Stan Lewis had other ideas. While chess records put out almost solely tracks by black artists, their subsidiary checker had recently released a single by a white artist, a song by Bobby Charles, called Later Alligator, which a short while later had become a hit for Bill Haley, under the longer title, See You Later Alligator.

thought that given that precedent, Chekker might be willing to put out another record by a white act, if that record was an answer record to Bobby Charles'. So he persuaded Hawkins to write a sounder-like song, which Hawkins in his band quickly demoed. See you soon, baboon. You big bad moon. I said that off to Cheka, who released Hawkins' demo, although they did make three small changes. The first was to add a Tarzan-style yodeling call at the beginning and end of the record. The second, which would have long-lasting consequences, was that they misspelled Hawkins's first name.

Leonard Chess misheard Del Hawkins over the phone, and the record came out as by Dale Hawkins, which would be his name from that point on. The last change was to remove Hawkins' songwriting credit and give it instead to Stan Lewis and Della Broadwater. Broadwater was the wife of Gene Nobles, a DJ to whom the Chess Brothers owed money. Nobles is also the one who supplied the Tarzan Cry. Both Lewis and Broadwater would also get credited for Hawkins's follow-up single, a new version of Susie Q. On that, at least,

Hawkins was credited as one of the writers, along with Lewis and Broadwater. But according to Hawkins, not only did the credit get split with the wrong people, but he didn't receive any of the royalties to which he was entitled until as late as 1985. And crucially, the other people who did co-write the song, notably James Burton, didn't get any credit at all. In general, there seems to be a great deal of disagreement about who contributed what to the song. I've seen various other putative co-authors listed. But everyone seems agreed that Hawkins came up with the lyrics,

while Burton came up with the guitar riff. Presumably, the song evolved from a jam session by the musicians. It's the kind of song that musicians come up with when they're jamming together, and that would explain the discrepancies in the stories as to who wrote it. Well, that and the record company ripping the writers off. The song came from a myriad musical sources. The most obvious influence for its overall sound, both the melody and the way the melody interacts with the guitar riff,

is Baby Please Don't Go by Muddy Waters. But the principal influence on the melody was, rather than Waters' song, a record by the Clovers, which had a very similar melody. I've got my eyes on you. Hawkins and Burton took those melodic and arrangement ideas and coupled them with a riff inspired by Howling Wolf. I've seen some people claim that the song was ripped off from Wolf. I don't believe myself that that is the case.

Wolf certainly had several records with similar riffs, like Smokestack Lightning, spoonful, but nothing with the exact same riff, and certainly nothing with the same melody. Some have also claimed that Wolf provided lyrical inspiration, that Hawkins was inspired by seeing Wolf drop to his knees on stage, yelling something about Susie. There are also claims that the song was named after Stan Lewis's daughter Susie. And notably Stan Lewis himself bolstered his claim to a co-writing credit for the song by pointing out that not only did he have a daughter named Susan,

so did Leonard Chess. He claimed he had mentioned this to Hawkins and suggested that the two of them write a song together with the name in it because it would appeal to Chess. Both of those tales of the song's lyrical inspiration may well be true, but I suspect that a more likely explanation is that the song is named after a dance move. We talked way back in episode four about the Lindy Hopp,

the popular dance from the late 1930s and 40s. That dance was never a formalized dance, and one of its major characteristics was that it would incorporate dance moves from any other dance around. And one of the dances it incorporated into itself was one called the Susie Q, which, at the height of its popularity, was promoted by a song performed by the pianist Lillian Hardin,

who is now best known for having been the wife of Louis Armstrong, whose career she managed in its early years, but who at the time was a respected jazz musician in her own right. The dance that that song was about was a simple dance step, involving crossing one's feet, swivelling and stepping to one side. It got incorporated into the more complex Lindy harp, but was still remembered as a step in itself. So, it's likely that Hawkins was at least as inspired by that

as he was by any of the other alleged inspirations for the song. Certainly, at least one other Checker Records artist thought so. Jimmy McRacklin, in his song The Walk, released the next year, starts his list of dancers by singing, I know you've heard, of the Susie Q. According to the engineer on the session, Bob Sullivan, who was more than, used to recording Jim Reeves and Slim Whitman than raw rock and roll music. Susie Q was recorded

in four takes, and Hawkins had the final choice of which take to use, but in Sullivan's opinion he chose the wrong one. The take chosen for release was an early take of the song, when Sullivan was still trying to get a balance, and he didn't notice at first that Hawkins was starting to sing, and he had to quickly raise the volume on Hawkins's vocal, just as he started. You can hear this if you listen to the finished recording. This new version of Susie Q was stripped right down. It was just guitar, bass and drums,

none of the saxophone that was present on the early version. But it kept the crucial ingredients of the early version. That biting guitar riff played by James Burton and the drum part with its ear-catching cowbell. That drum part was played by Stan Lewis's 15-year-old brother Ronnie on the new version, but he's closely copying the part that AJ Tominello played on the demo. Tuminello couldn't make the session, so Lewis just copied the part, which came about when Hawkins had heard Tuminello playing his drum and cowbell

simultaneously during a sound check. Now that we've put the song in context, there's an interesting point we can make. As we discussed in the beginning, people usually refer to Susie Q as a rockabilly song, but there are a few criteria that generally apply to rockabilly but not to Susie Q. And one of the most important of these ties back to something we were talking about last week, the electric bass. The demo version of Susie Q had, like almost all rock and roll records of the time, featured a double bass played in the music.

played in the slapback style. And as we talked about, back in the episodes on Bill Haley several months back, slapback bass is one of the defining features of the rockabilly genre. For this new recording, though, Sunny Tramol, a country player who played with Jim Reeves, played electric bass, as he was the only person in Shreveport who owned one. This was a deliberate choice by Hawkins, who wanted to imitate the sound of electric. electric blues records rather than using the double bass which he associated with country music. Though, as it turns out, he would probably have been better off using a double bass if he wanted that sound,

as Willie Dixon, who played bass on all the chess blues records, actually didn't play an electric bass. Rather, he got a sound similar to an electric bass by actually placing the microphone inside the bottom of the as talepiece. But that points to something that Susie Kew was doing that we've not seen before. One of the things people have asked me a few times

is why I've not looked very much at the music that we now think of as the blues, though at the time it was only a small part of the blues. The guitar playing male solo artists who made up the Chicago sound

and the Delta Blues men who inspired them. And that's because the common narrative that rock and roll came from that kind of blues is false, as I hope the last year and a bit of podcasts have shown. Rock and roll came from a lot

of different musics, primarily Western swing, jump bands and vocal group R&B, and had relatively little influence in its early years from that branch of the blues. But over the next few years, we will

see a lot of musicians, primarily but not exclusively, white British men, inspired by the first wave of rock and rollers to pick up a guitar, but rejecting the country music that inspired those early rock and rollers, and turning instead to Muddy Waters, Little Walter and Halen Wolf. There's never a first anything, and that's especially the case here, where we're talking about musical ideas crossing racial lines, but one can make an argument that Dale Hawkins was the first white rock and roller to be inspired by people like Waters and Wolf, and for Susie Q as the record more than any other, that presaged the white rock acts of the 60s, with its electric bass, chess-style guitar riffs, and country-inflected vocals. Acts like the Rolling Stones, or the

animals or canned heat were all following in Hawkins's footsteps, as you can hear in, for example, the Stones' own version of the song. What's surprising is how reluctant chess were to release the single. The master was sent to chess for release, but they kept hold of it for ten months without getting round to releasing it. Eventually, Hawkins became so frustrated that he sent a copy of the recording to Jerry Wexler at Atlantic Records. Wexler got excited and told Leonard Chess that if Chess weren't going to put out the single, Atlantic would release it instead.

At that point, Chess realised that he might have something commercial on his hands and decided to put the record out on Cheka, as it was originally intended. The song went to number 7 on the R&B charts, and number 27 on the pop charts. Between the recording and release of the single, James Burton quit the band. He moved on first to work with another Louisiana musician, Bob Luman.

Well, since the day you said goodbye, well nothing's right. I can't sleep tight all night long. Why must memory? Burton then went on to work first with Ricky Nelson and then as a session player with everyone from the monkeys to El. Hawkins had an ear for good guitarists, and after Burton went on to be one of the most important guitarists in rock music, Hawkins would continue to play with many other superb players, such as Roy Buchanan, who played on Hawkins' cover version of Little Walter's My Babe.

And then none of that midnight creeping I'm a true little baby She's my baby And then there was the guitarist On the closest he came To a follow-up hit Ladu-Dada That guitarist was another young player

Joe Osborne Who would soon follow James Burton To L.A. And to the pool of session players That became known as the wrecking crew though Osborne would switch his guitar for bass. However, none of Hawkins's follow-ups had anything more than very minor commercial success,

and he would increasingly find himself chasing trends and trying to catch up with other people's styles, rather than continuing with the raw rock and roll sound he had found on Susie Q. By the early 60s, he was recording novelty live albums of twist songs to try to cash in on the twist fad. Yeah, come out of your seat and see. When we start to do the twist,

everybody going to stop and see. After his brief run of hit's dried up, he used his connection with Dick Clark, the TV presenter whose American bandstand had helped to break Susie Q on the national market to get his own TV show, the Dale Hawkins show, which ran for 18 months and was a similar format to bandstand. Once that show was over, he turned to record production. There he once again worked for Stan Lewis, who by that point had started his own record labels. There seems to be some dispute as to which records Hawkins produced in his second career.

I've seen claims, for example, that he produced Hey Baby by Bruce Channel. But Hawkins is not the credited producer on that, or on Judy in disguise with glasses by John Fred and the Playboy band, another record he's often credited with. On the other hand, he is the credited producer on the big hit. Do it again just a little bit slower by John and Robin. Towards the end of the 60s, he had a brief second attempt at a recording career for himself. Credence Clearwater Revival had a hit in 1968 with their version of Susie Q.

And that was enough to draw Hawkins back into the studio, working once again with James Burton on guitar and Joe Osborne on bass, along with a few newer blues musicians like Taj Mahal and Raikuda, on an album full of the swamp rock style he had created in the 50s, L.A., Memphis and Tyler, Texas. When that wasn't a success, he moved on to RCA Records to become head of A&R for their West Coast. Rock Department, a job he was apparently put forward for by Joe Osborne. But after a successful

few years, he spent much of the 70s suffering from an amphetamine addiction, having started taking speed back in the 50s. He finally got clean in the early 80s and started touring the Rockabilly Revival Circuit, as well as finally getting his master's degree, which for a high school dropout was a major achievement and something to be as proud of as any hit. In 1998 he recorded his first album in 30 years, Wildcat Tamer. That got some of the best reviews of his career, but his next album took nearly a decade to come out, and by that time he had been diagnosed with the colon cancer that eventually killed him in 2010. Hawkins is in many ways a paradoxical figure. He was someone who pointed the way to the future of rock and roll,

but the future he pointed to was one of white men taking the ideas of black blues musicians and only slightly altering them. He was a byword for untutored, raw, instinctive rock and roll, and yet his biggest hit is carefully constructed out of bits of other people's records, melded together with a great deal of thought. At the end of it all, what survives is that one glorified, hit record. A guitar, a bass, drums, a cowbell, and a teenage boy singing of how he loves Susie Q. A history of rock music and 500 songs is brought to you by the generosity of my

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